“Sentences are the magic fabric of these marvelous odes and anti-odes. A prime Adrian Blevins sentence is both warpath and crossroad catapulting us from anxiety to ecstasy to lullaby on a bridge of ampersands. An Adrian Blevins sentence is a live wire, an electric lasso, a clairvoyant conveyer belt containing multitudes. Her poems curse, woo and storm ‘the sleazy codswallop of the muck’ of Memory. Every enlivening line has the cadence of a brilliant, stupefied heart. Status Pending is terrific.”
—Terrance Hayes
“Status Pending is a magical book, casting abecedarian spells and jangly riffs that transform our deepest griefs and fears into raucous, bawdy song. Yet, despite their masterful propulsive linguistic playfulness, these are poems that reckon unflinchingly with the raw and unbearable emotions of profound loss. Shifting effortlessly from Appalachian elegy to apocalyptic cultural critique, from wry humor to simple sorrow, Blevins's speaker has proven herself to be as wily and resilient as the nearly-mythic grey fox she loves.”
—Kathleen Graber
“Status Pending finds uncommon delight in common words, vernacular syntax and a range of playful poetic forms, to say nothing of the many permutations of human folly, ‘the trillion catastrophes of imprudence floating like apples to bob for.’ Surely, this is a poet who contains (and speaks for) multitudes, when she says: ‘America/ fuck you for making/ despondent bandits of us.’ If you happen to have lost your faith in poetry, don’t worry, Adrian Blevins will restore it.”
—Campbell McGrath